Some of the biggest players in the technology industry complain that the U.S. patent system is broken — putting too many patents of dubious merit in the hands of people who can use them to drag companies and other inventors to court.

And Blaise Mouttet, a small inventor in Alexandria, Virginia, thinks he knows why. The problem, he said, is that “there are too many lawyers and not enough inventors involved with the patent system.”

So Mouttet is taking part in an experimental program launched in June 2007 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and backed by the technology industry that is intended to give the public — including inventors — more of a voice in the system.

The Stop Software Patents website carries a copy of a press release put out by SUEPO – the union representing European Patent Office examiners – to coincide with the one day strike of EPO staff and a protest to be held in Brussels, both of which are scheduled for this Thursday, 18th September.

According to this release: “The confidence of the workforce in the EPO President, Alison Brimelow, and her Vice-Presidents is very low. According to internal staff survey conducted in June 2008, only 6% of the workforce have confidence in the management qualities of this body. And only 9% of the patent examiners believe that Brimelow and the Vice-Presidents actively promote patent quality.”

100 T-shirts with the Red Dove and the Stop Software Patents slogan arrive tomorrow at the Brussels office, so pre-order yours! The previous yellow one is a collector now.

Microsoft, Patent Trolls, and GPLv3

Microsoft’s good friend Acacia [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] has just been crowned top-of-the-league patent troll. This ought to show just what type of company is now being run by former Microsoft executives in its higher ranks.

Acacia Technologies is the most litigious non-practising entity/troll (delete according to preference) in the United States. According to research done by PatentFreedom, which is featured in an article to be published in the next issue of IAM, Acacia has been involved in a total of 308 cases in the US courts, 239 of which have been filed since 2003. In second place is Rates Technology Inc, which has been involved in 130 cases – although just 38 have been over the last six years.

The licence which defangs patent trolls is continues to be adopted pretty well. GPLv3 has just crossed the 3,000-projects milestone, according to Palamida’s count.

After over a year of tracking GPL3 adoption, we would like to announce that 3000 projects have adopted version 3 of the GNU GPL License. The strong adoption rate represented by this milestone shows the continued acceptance of this license by the Open Source and Free Software communities. We’d like to thank everyone that has been involved with this project. Without your hard work, none of this would’ve been possible.

In order to resolve this problem completely, software patents will need to be dropped altogether. █

“Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.”

Sub-notebooks

Kahilo are hoping to drum up enough interest in their Linux-based KU860 convertible UMPC for someone to buy a few dozen crates and slap a company logo on them; the OEM is offering this 7-inch WXGA touchscreen device for bulk orders. Running a 1.2GHz VIA C7-M processor, 1GB of RAM and up to a 60GB hard-drive, it also includes GPS for the navigationally-challenged.

GNU/Linux

Luk Claes reported on the progress regarding the release of the new stable release Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny. While there are still a lot of release critical bugs to be fixed, Lenny is in good enough shape to call for upgrade tests and work on the release notes.

Embedded Linux is rapidly encroaching upon application spaces once considered the exclusive domain of embedded kernels such as VxWorks, pSOS and in-house platforms. Industry analysts show embedded Linux and open source garnering up to one-third of 32 and 64-bit designs, more than twice the share of any other embedded OS.

Viet Nam’s open-source developers have joined Moblin.org, an international open-source community by adding a Vietnamese interface on the website as well as launching a competition among Vietnamese coders.

This was probably inevitable. I first brought it up here and Mark Shuttleworth soon replied, refusing the refute the speculation. So, Canonical will be paying Microsoft indirectly (for codecs). We’ll explain the source of this problem in a moment.

Inexpensive add-on applications that will provide audio codecs and a DVD player to expand the multimedia capabilities of the four-year-old Linux operating system are now available for purchase in the Ubuntu online store.

[...]

Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, said today that it has reached deals with two software vendors, Cyberlink and Fluendo, to sell their DVD player and audio codec applications directly to consumers through the online store. The products are already installed under previous licensing agreements for many laptop and desktop computers that are sold preloaded with Ubuntu Linux from hardware vendors, according to Ubuntu.

Just to clarify, we have written literally hundreds of posts denouncing software patents and we continue to do so. We don’t write this to provoke and it’s important that to understand where GNU/Linux is moving. Payments to Microsoft for codecs is perhaps only a beginning and, either way, it elevates the price of Free software and legitimises software patents. These don’t belong in industry and especially not inside data formats which were made prevalent using the Web.

Microsoft actively encourages (through default file formats) the proliferation of such digital poison, which has already come under antitrust probes. Licensing this technology as Canonical does is a step backwards because it’s a sign of acceptance, not rejection. Here is another new example of patents inside standards. [via Digital Majority]

InterDigital develops advanced mobile broadband technologies and products, is a leading contributor to the global wireless standards, and has patent license agreements with many leading mobile device manufacturers.

Free software simply cannot play this game. It ceases to be Free under such an ecosystem.

More people have begun questioning patents in general, not just software patents. It’s important to support these people, as opposed to supporting WMV and WMA.

In the last Venture Capital Journal, Thomas Klein from Wilson Sonsini wrote a great article (Actually link doesn’t work – this article requires subscription) about the diminishing value of patents for early stage technology companies. In the short article he quoted 5 recent court decisions that have created limited the value of patents. I will not repeat all the 5 cases that he quotes, but his overall verdict is clear: Leveraging patents in the courtroom is becoming harder and harder.

Patents are typically about selfishness (personal gain) and the key problem is that once they are widely accepted, other people’s selfishness saturates and floods the industrial atmosphere. It stifles development. It’s like advocating the possession of a gun by everyone as means of enhancing security. It’s only the ruthless loose cannons (trolls) and graveyards/funeral services (lawyers) who win the most. They thrive in increased ‘business’. █

We are looking for people with experience in Linux, with experience building software from source code and good C# or Java skills. Experience with ASP.NET and ADO.NET is a plus.

It seems probable that Novell will recruit a Microsoft-sympathetic crowd, which will then change the social fabric and strategic inclinations of the company. Many of the GNU/Linux-faithful have already left Novell because of the deal with Microsoft. Those who are left are more willing to take orders — so to speak — from Redmond.

SJVN has just published an article where he rightly argues that Novell serves Microsoft better when it’s isolated and therefore can approach Free software projects and communities. He concurs with our idea that Novell is becoming to Microsoft what Citrix already is (and no, we never suggested that Microsoft might buy Novell, but we referenced some "what if" Op-Eds).

Given a choice in the matter, Microsoft would happily bury Linux and open source in the IT trash-heap, but buying Novell wouldn’t get them one whit closer to that goal. That’s one of the reasons why Microsoft finds Linux so annoying. Unlike proprietary software companies, they can’t simply crush or buy it out of existence. As soon as they smashed one open-source company, another would pop up with the exact same software.

So, for now, they’ll work grudgingly with Novell, but buy Novell? It’s just not going to happen. Now, if Microsoft 7, or Vista Mark Two as I’m beginning to think of it, flops as badly as Vista, then maybe Microsoft will start considering changing its way. So, talk to me again about Microsoft buying Novell, or here’s a scary thought, Red Hat, in two years time and I might have a different answer. For now, though, Microsoft is getting what it wants from both Citrix and Novell without buying either one and that’s more than good enough for the boys from Redmond.

MS is just sitting back waiting until Novell relies on them to supply the bulk of their business…then they
will extinguish them.

Until then, Novell’s value (and thus market impact) will continue to diminish. As Joe Panettieri wrote yesterday: “Lack of integration — perceived or real — is costing NOVL business. A prime example: The VAR Guy knows of at least one major US broadband provider that is moving away from GroupWise and other NOVL offerings because the GroupWise releases have more features on Windows Server and fewer features on Novell’s own SUSE Linux.

“The broadband provider has decided to standardize on a complete Microsoft .Net environment with Exchange instead.

“In short, Novell has to become its own best ISV for SUSE Linux — fast.”